Abandoned Appalachia Series – The Kingdom Come School of Linefork, Letcher County On a clear day at Kingdom Come State Park the overlooks pull your eyes outward to black bear country and the sawtooth ridges of Letcher and Harlan counties. Look long enough down into the Linefork valley though and another landmark begins to stand out. In the bottom, beside Highway 160, the roofline of a brick school building breaks the tree line.

Repurposed Appalachia Series​ – Harlan County Extension Depot: From L&N Station Site to Community Classroom On a short bend of River Street in downtown Harlan, a long, depot-shaped building sits with its wide eaves turned toward the tracks. On the county extension website it appears in plain bureaucratic language as the Harlan County Extension Depot, 110 River Street, listed alongside the main office on South Main Street.

Forgotten Appalachia Series – Dunham High School: Letcher County’s Only Black High School in Jenkins, Kentucky If you drive up No. 4 Hollow above Jenkins today, the road climbs past St. George Catholic Church and a handful of houses before it levels off on a narrow shelf of ground. Here, on a bend in the hollow, a low concrete-block wing stands in the weeds.

Appalachian Churches Series – Jenkins United Methodist Church in Jenkins, Kentucky On the uphill side of Main Street in Jenkins, Kentucky, a two story brick church with a row of tall arched windows still looks out over the old company town. Across the street the former depot holds the David A. Zegeer Coal Railroad Museum, and behind both buildings the hills rise steeply toward former mine camps and company houses.

In this post I’ll use R to recap my running data from 2025. Previous round-ups are here (2021, 2022, 2023, not sure why I didn’t post one for 2024…). I had a goal of running a total distance of 3650 km in 2025.

Sandwich compounds are the colloquial term used for molecules where a metal atom such as an iron dication is “sandwiched” between two carbon-based rings as ligands, most commonly cyclopentadienyl anion (the “bread”) as in e.g. Ferrocene – a molecule first discovered in 1951.

Do it yourself. I don’t mean that as a descriptive phrase. It’s a complete sentence, in the imperative. Do it yourself. Pick up the pencil, pen, stylus, paintbrush, airbrush, mouse, keyboard, scissors, rolling  pin, hammer, drill, wrench, saw, welding torch, sewing needle, instrument, guitar pick, pickaxe, shovel, dumbbell, jump rope, paddle, piton, hiking pole.

Part 3 in a series of posts going back 14 years

Appalachian History Series – The Appalachian Trail and the Making of Appalachia On a clear morning on any high ridge from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail feels simple. White blazes on tree trunks. A narrow ribbon of dirt. The soft scrape of boots on rock. Step back a little, though, and that narrow path turns out to be something much bigger.

The York Brothers, George and Leslie “Les” York, grew up in a musical family in Lawrence County, Kentucky. From an early age, they learned to play guitar and harmonize and began performing locally. George left school after the eighth grade and briefly worked in the coal mines. Even while mining, he continued to play music on the side.

Shadow libraries, that is, illegal massive repositories of books of all kinds, are of course prone to takedowns by police and disappearance from the internet. In recent days, one of the most prominent shadow libraries, Library Genesis (libgen), was taken down and its archive removed from public consumption.